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I think this thread kind of illustrates the problem. Contrast the reaction to the 2016 Trump-Russia story.
First, Russia-Trump. We know that Russia was committing crimes against Americans to help Trump's campaign, that the campaign was aware of that before the public, that they met to discuss tradeoffs, that the campaign shared proprietary data with Russia, and that they lied to investigators to cover all this up. Bunch of other weird things (why was Trump so into Flynn, who was clearly corrupt? Manafort chaired Trump's campaign for free to pay off a loan to a Russian oligarch, etc.). Trump first fired the FBI director in an unprecedented move to stop the investigation. Then we get a special prosecutor, who finds multiple instances of obstruction of the investigation by Trump but is unable to legally establish a criminal conspiracy. What happens next? Normies are like, "hmm, maybe we went too far there, it's not 100% certain that Trump was involved" and mostly stop talking about it, while hacks declare victory and insist that the whole thing should never have even been investigated, and that the investigation was somehow a plot to steal the election, even though it didn't come out until after the election was over.
Now, Biden-Ukraine. Biden never had much to do with Ukraine, and the main story here never made sense. It wasn't like deposing Shokin was some quirky policy that Biden pursued on his own. It was totally uncontroversial--had bipartisan support in America and support from other countries around the world. Biden was just carrying out policy set by Obama and the Senate. And the issue was that Shokin was *not* investigating corruption. The source for the claim that Biden accepted a direct bribe is now known to have been lying (and the Trump-appointed prosecutor looking into the allegations against Biden is charging him for it) on behalf of Russia. The only other thing was some cryptic line in a email Hunter Biden received about a deal that didn't happen. But rather than retreat, rightists are just brazenly lying about what Hunter said in his testimony and acting like the charges against the lying "informant" reflect a conspiracy against him. And normies are reacting by saying, "well, maybe there's still something here. They should keep investigating because they might find something."
At every step of the way, the rightist media is proclaiming absolute certainty despite the evidence going against them, and normies are expressing a lot of doubt and a lack of any spirit to fight. As Lord Bertie said: "The fundamental cause of the trouble is that in the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt." Though there's also an aspect of integrity here. And, hey, integrity and skepticism are burdens but I think they are good burdens to carry. I would not want normie liberals to mimic Fox News or Breitbart or something. But they should push back more than they do. They--we--should be able to say that it's not acceptable to accuse people of horrible shit just because you don't want them to win elections. Enough is enough.
